As a contact relationship management (CRM) platform, HubSpot gives individuals and businesses a functional (and attractive) place to store, organize, and understand data of all sorts.
Whether you need to know information about a specific individual or a potential client, there is a place for you to store that information in HubSpot—properties.
First, let's start with:
A HubSpot property is the field you use to collect various types of data. These are the types of information you're going to collect and how it will be formatted.
Here's HubSpot's definition: "Properties are fields that store information on HubSpot records."
You really can think of HubSpot properties as columns in an Excel spreadsheet. For example, for a line item such as a person, you would have a column for first name, last name, email address, street address, and so on. Each of these different columns equates to an individual HubSpot property. These examples are defaults that HubSpot has for all accounts, but you can create new ones specific to your needs.
Note: there are other types of properties, but these are the three most critical to know and understand. Some of the others are dependent on how you use HubSpot and what you use it for.
A contact property is the field used to collect data about an individual. This could be demographic information, such as age, familial status, gender, and so on. This could also be what actions they have taken with you, your business, and your content.
Why are they important? Contact properties help you understand who is in your CRM, how they've interacted with you, where they are in your sales process (or if they're a customer). Because contact properties are essentially data fields, they give you the ability to segment and create lists based on certain properties. The more you know about an individual, the better you can ensure you're sending the right message, at the right time, in the right format.
A company property is the field used to collect data about a particular business. You may want to know how many employees it has, where it's located, or as simple as collecting its website or LinkedIn URL. Company data is particularly helpful for understanding what size businesses you typically work with and if there are certain attributes that typically lead to customers.
A deal property is the field used to collect data about a potential business opportunity that could lead to a client or customer.
If you're using HubSpot as your pipeline management system, you'll have created an entire process to create and move deal records through your pipeline. To do that, you need information about deals, such as the amount, its owner, when you expect it to close, and so on. Each of these data points about the opportunity will be housed in deal properties.
HubSpot properties are a main component of your HubSpot CRM, so it's worth spending time understanding what properties you already have set up for your contacts, companies, and deals. You're likely collecting a lot of data without realizing it, but you could be missing out on additional (and very important) data if you haven't set up custom properties related to your business.
If you need help creating or managing your HubSpot properties or need an audit of your existing setup to determine where you can consolidate information, our team can help. Book your free consultation today!